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I’ve decided not to release this month, August 30th was approaching quickly and the game just isn’t quite where I want it to be. It’s close, so very close, but not quite there yet. I was finding game breaking bugs just about every day so I’m not confident the game is ready for public consumption just yet.

To be honest when I first announced HOBL2 was going to release in early access in March this year I had really just pulled that date our of nowhere. It seemed aggressive but achievable, but to be honest I mostly just guessed at a date. But you only get one first release and I’d like it to go smoothly, so September 30th is now the new official early access release date!

As the date approaches I’ve given some thought to how long and far the game has come. I’ve been working on HOBL2 since October 2014 – at least that’s when I started submitting changes to source control. That’s almost 5 years now, and I was curious just how that work was spread our over the years so I took a look at my source control change logs:

5 Years of Development

That’s the number of commits to SVN per month for the last 5 years. I’m pretty impressed with my own tenacity on this project. It averages 0.89 changes per day, every day, for 5 whole year.

That fits pretty well with my philosophy of working a bit every day on my game. Whether it’s adding a whole new feature or just playing for 15 minutes, I try and touch the game every day. Part-time game dev is definitely a marathon not a sprint. I don’t always follow my rule, but I try and I think the graph above shows that as well.

There are some interesting patterns too – you can see the first month spike of excitement. The drop off in November and December of 2014 is due to my push of final large update to HOBL1. You can see my excitement continue for a couple of months and then start to slow in the summer.

The increase after September of 2015 is due to me taking three months off to take care of my first daughter, and the sharp drop after December 2015 is me starting a new full time job. After that you can see this cyclic rise and fall of effort and motivation over the years.

Finally you can see the show increase from Oct 2018 onward once I decided to enter early access. The drop in March and April 2019 represents a change of jobs and a second daughter. The July spike should be obvious as I switched from slow part-time development mode into ship-it mode for my early access release. August is only half over so I expect it to surpass July’s changes. September will hopefully slow down as the bugs and fixes calm down as I prepare and test release build.